High-tech hunt for missing helicopter

The phone rang at 11 p.m. Tuesday in a little-known building on a sliver of land off the west coast of Florida. At the same time, an email arrived at the office.

HOWARD FRANK

The phone rang at 11 p.m. Tuesday in a little-known building on a sliver of land off the west coast of Florida. At the same time, an email arrived at the office.

Those two events activated dozens of people over several states, resulting in the unlikely rescue of one man in a deadly Mount Pocono helicopter crash.

The call was an "ALNOT," an alert notice from the Federal Aviation Administration.

It arrived at the United States Air Force Rescue Coordination Center on Tyndall Air Force Base, east of Panama City.

The group coordinates on-land federal search and rescue activities in the 48 contiguous United States, neighboring waters, Mexico and Canada.

The FAA told Airman Sgt. Christopher Uppling an aircraft, a Bell 407 helicopter, was overdue, its location unknown and that it may be in the area of northeastern Pennsylvania.

The FAA spent the preceding two hours calling local airports and family of the suspected occupants, collecting data before contacting the center.

"(The FAA) has all the relevant information on a particular missing aircraft. This one had the plan of when they were traveling and the cellphone of the pilot," Uppling said.

Once Uppling and his staff determined the likely route, and factored the bad weather and a report of the copter diverting to the Poconos, the center changed the situation's classification from "incident" to "mission."

It was 11:50 p.m.

Uppling contacted the Pennsylvania Emergency Management Agency and briefed it on the situation.

The agency said it would try to coordinate local assets, including state police, through Monroe County's Office of Emergency Management Agency.

When the search for the missing helicopter began, Ogden said, they already knew from conversations with the families there were three cellphones on the aircraft.

Ogden, who is a major with the volunteer Civil Air Patrol, contacted two different service providers to request data on the different phones.

"They have a 24/7 center with analysts working for situations like we had going on," he said.

For Ogden, it became a matter of collecting the data from the various phones and entering it into proprietary software he developed for this purpose.

Two of the phones weren't activated, although he received some historical location data from the pilot's phone.

That, along with the family's accounts of the traveler's plans, helped him plot a flight course.

But they also got lucky. One passenger's phone, belonging to Stephen Barral, 50, of Bernardsville, N.J., was still on.

"We were able to get a ping out of it that gave us a precision location, a set of coordinates with a certain degree of accuracy," he said.

Barral's phone identified two locations, one with an accuracy of 50 feet and the other of 100 feet. Ogden plotted them on a map and drew circles representing the radiuses. The two circles intersected.

Ogden overlaid his map on a Google Maps image. He could clearly see Interstate 380 next to the suspected crash site.

Then he used Google Street Maps to identify the exact mile marker near the crash.

He passed the information along to Monroe County's Emergency Management staff, which created its own map that coincided with Ogden's.

That was at 2 a.m.

It took local police 20 minutes to find the wreckage.

"I got an email from the dispatch manager at the 911 center" alerting him they found the crash site, Ogden said.

Yet he continued to plot locations, since investigators originally thought there were four people aboard the craft.

The Air Force Rescue Coordination Center handled 5,040 incidents so far in 2012.

Of those, 627 became missions and 156 lives were saved, including Barral's.

Since the center was activated in 1974, over 15,800 lives have been saved.

"At the end of the day, the lives we save is great," said Lt. Col. Robert Russell, commander of the rescue center. "But it's also good for us to know at the end of the night, if there are deceased, we've let the loved ones know so the family has that closure."

Killed in Tuesday's crash were pilot William Ellsworth, 52, of Califon, N.J., and passenger Tighe Sullivan, 51, of Darien, Conn.

"It's always a good feeling to find out there are survivors on a mission," Uppling said. "It's a good feeling at the end of the day."

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